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Friday, February 1, 2013

Bookshelf for a Work-in-Progress by Erica Olsen

When I housesit for several months for friends
in rural southwest Colorado, I allow myself to bring along a single bookcase,
tall and narrow, made of lightweight pine and fitting easily in the back of my
Jeep. The rest of my library—thirty-five boxes of books—is in storage across
the state line in Blanding, Utah.

Of the five shelves on my bookcase, the
top one is the most important, because it holds the books related to my
work-in-progress, a novel with the working title Rivers of America. The shelf is just below eye-level. Not
intimidatingly high, not so low as to be out of sight.

My novel includes invented geography and
natural history, which are also elements of my recently published story
collection, Recapture & Other Stories
(Torrey House Press, 2012). The novel is set, in part, on a massive natural
bridge in southern Utah’s canyon country. (Picture the Ponte Vecchio built on
red rock.) It’s partly inspired by a story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which Apollo pursues a nymph who escapes by
turning into a laurel tree. In my novel, it’s aspens instead of laurels, and
the cast of characters includes archaeologists and miners working during a gold
rush, or possibly a uranium boom.

Accordingly, the contents of my top shelf
range in time from ancient to contemporary, and in space from Europe to the
Americas. The books include:

Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, translated by Arthur
Golding, 1567.

Prose
fiction from the English Renaissance, including Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, a book I loathed with all my
heart when it was required reading for one of my graduate courses in English
lit twenty years ago. I’ve been drawn back to it for its form, a Greek-inspired
romance quite unlike the modern, post-18th-century novel.

Books
about places, real and imaginary: the WPA-produced Utah: A Guide to the State; several volumes in the landmark Rivers of America history series; Holy Land by D. J. Waldie, a memoir
about growing up in Southern California tract housing; and Italo Calvino’s
novel, Invisible Cities.

Books
about words and places: John R. Stilgoe’s Shallow
Water Dictionary, an essay on the language and landscape of tidal marshes,
and The Books of the Colorado River and
the Grand Canyon, a bibliography.

Books
on my Scandinavian heritage: The History
of theSöderfors Anchor-Works, a
translation of a 1791 history of the village where my Swedish ancestors lived
and worked; and two histories of Stavanger, the port city on the southwest
coast of Norway where another branch of my family came from. (The stories of my
great-grandmother, Frida, from Söderfors, and my great-grandfather, Andreas,
from Stavanger, are going into my third book. (Believing in a third book gives
me the courage to complete book two.)

If I could, I’d keep all of these books open
on a book-wheel, like this wonderful device (pictured right) I saw a few years
ago—and surreptitiously photographed—at the Biblioteca Palafoxiana, the library
established in 1646 in Puebla, Mexico. The perfect bookcase for those of us who
can’t keep to just one shelf.

2 comments:

I love that bookshelf! I totally need one of those, and hurray for your book "Recapture". I read it, and I have to admit, you must be psychic or something, because the last chapter had an uncanny similarity to my husband and I....congrats again!

Welcome to 1 Bookshelf

For those of us who read and write, books have a way of shaping our lives. As I look at my bookshelf, I realize my life is reflected in the books I have read. Examining one shelf, I see six months or a year or a lifetime of experiences. It's not only what's in the book that shapes the experience. I've found part of the book experience is where I've read it, and what I was doing at the time, and who with. When I pick up a book, I see friends, family, and situations.

1 Bookshelf is a way to share our book experiences one shelf at a time. When you look at one shelf, what story does it tell? If you're interested in sharing your bookshelf, and partaking in this mini oral history project, see our simple guidelines page.

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